


Mercy

by Barkour



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 20:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13084515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: The hurting was a knife between them.





	Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for the RFFA TLJ bingo, square: "Please."

Blood spilled hot and red across the dirtied stone. The vividity of it caused her to pause there at the lip of the steps, with her lightsaber yet poised to swing.

He clapped a bared hand to his neck. The blood made runnels between his fingers, and there between his lips, and Kylo Ren looked to Rey in shock then fell to his knees and the one hand. 

A stray blaster bolt, she thought. War and chaos engulfed them, the stink of smoke and burnt flesh. She had come to defeat the new-crowned supreme leader and instead it was a misaimed bolt that saw him bent to the earth. 

He made some horrid gurgling noise. The pale-wetted-scarlet fingers at his gashed throat spasmed. Death smelled the air. She felt him then in the force, as she had not allowed herself to feel him all these long months.

Rey switched off her saber and stuck it to the magnetized loop on her belt even as she skidded down the steps to kneel beside him, her hand atop his hand atop his throat. 

He looked at her through his lashes. His eyes were black. He said, “You’re here,” too wet a thing. His mouth was red as the muscle exposed beneath the stripped flesh. He tried to swallow and, shuddering, instead gagged.

Even as breath failed him she reached through his flesh for the purest self. He hurt. He was frightened. A powerful, desperate hunger moved across her, a thing that wasn’t the force but only him. His eyes were black, black.

Everything he had fell away. She saw Rey as he saw Rey, illuminated by fire and tall, a creature of elbows and long jaw and strong shoulders: a promise of deliverance. 

There was blood on her too now. It coursed down her wrist. A line veered south before it met her elbow. 

She said, “You’re bleeding out,” more softly than he deserved. 

The galloping beat of his heart moved beneath her own heartbeat. He knew he was dying. 

You don’t deserve mercy, she thought.

He showed his teeth in a skull’s smile. I don’t want for it. As if to prove it to her he pushed into her mind images, things she could not understand, a desire that frightened her. A lake house, a black throne, Rey in the robes of an Old Republic Jedi then Rey wearing a white stone circlet and holding out her hand, holding it out to-- 

That hunger was growing, fed with despair.

These things you’re showing me, she thought with alarm, these things aren’t real, what trick is this now?

“No trick,” he managed, and his hand slid away from his neck. She let it fall. His eyes rolled. Dying pale, he sank into her.

“Then what—”

He thought, If I were other than what I were— and a mean-edged amusement welled from somewhere in him; but the pain was greater even than this, and the tide of wanting receded.

She held him and thought ferociously of Snoke’s chamber, and of the moment they had turned to each other and she had thought he would stand by her, and if she had held her hand out to him would he have taken it after all?

Stop, he thought with violence. Stop.

His lips moved.

“Please,” he said faintly.

The hurting was a knife between them.

Rey ignited the lightsaber. In the last moment he closed his eyes. She saw the lake again. The pretty house. A tall man, not handsome, with a mess of black hair; but if he smiled. Oh, how he smiled. 

Then the lake was gone. It was never there. 

Rey stood. His blood was cooling on her arm. She looked at the crumpled form. 

“Find peace,” she said to the body. “If you can.”

Was there peace for any of them? 

Somewhere near on the field of battle a munitions canister exploded. Shouts, everywhere. The heralds of war. She turned.


End file.
